Last week I mentioned to those of you who follow me on Twitter that I was trying out for the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Since this tale would be several hundred tweets long, I’ll fill you in here.

My head is full of useless things. I know scraps of information about a lot of stuff. I don’t know enough about any of that stuff to actually be productive, unless you define productivity as being able to administer some truly medieval beatings to people in trivia contests. My head is so full of these scraps that I have no room for things that are important – things like mathematics and people’s names.

I was driving home from work about a week ago and happened by the location where auditions were going to be held. A sign gave the date and times. I was off that day. I realized that this was my opportunity to make something out of the scraps of nothing in my head. I filled out the application form I found on-line. I signed that I agreed to pay my way to New York if I were selected to be on the show and went to bed early the night before the audition.

The audition site was ten minutes from my house. I’m a prompt guy so I aimed to arrive half an hour early.

The Early Bird Gets…

Who needs this pressure? I am a man with options. (Image via Wikipedia)

As I drove, my mind started working on me…this is an audition, I don’t audition for stuff. I don’t even know how to act for an audition. I’ll bet I was I supposed to dress up, because I didn’t. No, maybe it was better to dress nicely, yet comfortably, so I’d be ready for anything. Ready for anything? What am I thinking? It is a try out for a quiz show, they aren’t going to be swinging boards with rusty nails at my head. What if I made it and did something really dumb? What if I lost on the first question? This is foolish, I should go home and watch Tom and Jerry.

The obvious solution was to stop and grab some breakfast to settle down. It worked and I still arrived thirty minutes early. I arrived thirty minutes early and found at least 500 people in line already. I later learned that the people in the front of the line had been there since 8 p.m, eleven hours ahead of the audition time.

Five hundred people. Things looked bad. The early bird gets the end of the long, long line.

I Make Good Use Of My Time

Given that I was way back in line, I had to do something to convince myself this was not an exercise in futility. The solution was obvious. I started eliminating people. I’m sure there would have been objections if I’d gone and started removing people from the line based on my assessments. The next best thing was to eliminate them in my mind as people who had a chance against the game show juggernaut that I was destined to be.

I eliminated a lot of people who did not seem to have their forms filled out. Many of them were unaware there was even a form. If you don’t do enough research to know there’s a form, you can’t beat me. Dismissed.

Neck tattoo woman. Dismissed.

Guy told us all that he’d be putting his high-priced education to work. Dismissed.

“Apparently auditions magnify my ability to be judgmental.” If that is the case, I shall never audition for anything. I’m judgmental enough ‘as-is’.
You do not have room in your head for mathematics? I like you even more, Oma!
Can’t wait to hear the rest of the story.

We get the English version of that show down here. I’m not sure what sort of selection algorithm they use but it doesn’t seem to include intellect or appearance but rather a cute plan for spending the million bucks.

Oh, I’ll be back, oh, yeah! I can’t wait to hear the part about how you went unnoticed injecting dozens of your competition with a throat paralyzing drug and surreptitiously shooting poison darts at others. You, man who has tortured the dry cleaning, singing doofus, are not one to toy with.

“My head is so full of these scraps that I have no room for things that are important – things like mathematics and people’s names.” This is sooo me! If I had a nickel for every person who told me that I would be their “phone a friend” person, I would have at least a couple bucks.

I think your process of elimination could be construed as “profiling.” How very un-PC of you. ;)

And I thought they did auditions online. That show needs to get into the 21st century.

Unfortunately, if you make it, I won’t be able to see you on the show unless it is on one of the “free” networks. All I get is “limited” cable: 22 mostly BS channels but I need that for cable Internet service from Comcast.

“Millionaire” is good for the money. But for bragging rights, it’s Jeopardy. Our mailman won something like $30,000 on Jeopardy a few years back.